Shuttered

Ever since your film The Sixth Sense became a smash hit, it
seems popular culture has been deluged with shaggy-dog stories in which
everything you think you know about the main character is violently
upended in the last few minutes. In fact, everything the main character
thought he or she knew about him or herself gets tossed out the window as
well.

Here's the problem with this approach: It's very tricky to pull off.
Oh, any moron (no offense) can dream up a story in which a guy figures out
he's not what he thought he was. But it's all too easy for this gimmick to
overpower the story. Worse, it's not hard at all for this particular
gimmick to render a story irrelevant.

Let's take Shutter Island as a case in point. It's a radical
departure for acclaimed writer Dennis Lehane, whose series of novels about
blue-collar Boston detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro
established him as a first-class storyteller, using the detective idiom to
construct brutally violent and unflinching explorations of our darker
instincts. His last work, the best-selling Mystic River, mined
similar terrain: It's a stand-alone tale about three childhood friends and
a bond between them that carries serious and deadly repercussions into
their adult lives. Like those books, Shutter Island deals with the
killer inside all of us, that barely-suppressed monster lurking beneath
humanity's cultivated veneer of civility.

But despite its thematic similarities to Lehane's earlier works,
Shutter Island far removed from either of those worlds: It takes place
in the '50s, on an island that houses a hospital-slash-prison for the
criminally insane. Teddy Daniels, a U.S. Marshall still mourning the death
of his wife from two years before, is assigned to investigate an escape
from the hospital. On the ferry that takes him from Boston to the island,
Daniels makes the acquaintance of his brand-new partner, Chuck Aule. Once
the pair arrives at the island, they're presented with that most reliable
of staples: the locked room mystery. How did Rachel Solando, a woman
imprisoned for murdering her own children, make it out of her room, past
several guards and off of the premises? The hospital's staff proves
perversely -- maybe even purposefully -- unhelpful, and as twist piles
atop twist, Teddy considers the prospect that his own ulterior motive for
coming to Shutter Island -- Andrew Laeddis, the arsonist who set the fire
that killed Teddy's wife, is held here -- may have made him a threat to
the hospital administrators, who may very well be conducting abhorrent
experiments on the dangerous criminals locked away in the secluded Ward C.
Once Chuck disappears, Teddy has to face the grisly possibility that the
staff refuses to let him off the island alive.

The change of milieu is initially jarring, but Lehane proves a
competent thriller writer regardless of the setting or genre. And he
unspools his tense narrative with a minimalist's flair for withholding
details. It's a tribute to Lehane's skill that we empathize with Teddy
despite the fact that we're continually reminded of just how little we
know about him. And Lehane seeds his pages with crumbs of clues that
scratch at the back of the reader's mind without giving too much away too
soon. Which isn't to say that you don't see the final plot twist -- or at
least a flickering glimmer of it -- coming at least a hundred pages before
it unfolds: You most certainly do. But even then, Lehane keeps things
murky enough to make you wonder, and the plot takes a red herring turn or
two to throw you off the track before it eventually confirms your worst
suspicions.

About that climax, M. Night: Yes, it's affecting. Yes, it's
well-handled, even given the fact that you figure it out beforehand. But
when Teddy finds out, in classic thriller fashion, that everything he
believes is a lie, the whole book falls apart like a too-delicate
flan. When Bruce Willis's character reaches a similar conclusion at the
end of The Sixth Sense, or when Nicole Kidman reaches much the same
conclusion at the end of The Others, these revelations don't
undermine what's come before. But Teddy's wrenching discovery invalidates
everything -- and I do mean everything -- that's come before.
Teddy's whole experience is an elaborate hoax (and I'm fairly confident
I'm not giving too much away by saying that), and thus our emotional
involvement with him is rendered null and void.

(Spoiler alert: Plot giveaway ahead.) It's one thing to be
tricked by a clever writer who keeps pulling the carpet out from under
you. It's another altogether to learn that you've been manipulated into
caring about something that didn't happen, for someone -- several someones,
actually -- that didn't exist. (Okay, we all know that no fictional
characters really exist; don't split hairs here.) Lehane tries to
go for the twist ending you've turned into a franchise, Mr. Shyamalan, but
he fails, and spectacularly, because he doesn't understand the subtle
difference between a protagonist learning he's been tricked and a
protagonist learning that he is a trick. Your last two films, the
wildly uneven Unbreakable and the frustratingly illogical
Signs, didn't
quite cross that line, but they laid a groundwork that may cause many
readers to accept Lehane's preposterous conclusion at face value. That's
fine; it's their right as consumers to be entertained, even by as hollow a
manipulation as Shutter Island. But for those readers who don't
enjoy having their investment of time and intellect, over the course of
300 pages, callously and/or amateurishly tossed aside, Mr. Shyamalan, you
make a pretty handy scapegoat.